Maa Parviti the Divine Model

‘Daughter of the Mountain,’ Parvati Devi is the primary personification of Shakti Herself. Her consort is Shiva; Her children are Ganesh and Skanda, but in fact she is the mother of all gods and goddesses, of all humanity and of creation itself. Being Shakti’s ‘base form,’ Parvati manifests her wrath as Durga and Kali; and her benevolence as Lakshmi and Saraswati. She is every other goddess as well; when we worship any goddess, or for that matter even any god, we ultimately worship her.

A Balancing Principle

Parvati is Shakti’s (i.e. the Divine Feminine’s) second incarnation as the wife of Shiva. After Shiva’s first wife Sati died, her divine body parts were strewn all over India (all the places where these parts landed became Shakti peeths, or ’seats of the goddess,’ and are now sites of Devi temples) and Shiva turned his back completely on the world, resuming the life of an ascetic in a remote Himalayan cave, while the demon Taraka overran the heavens above and the earth below.With no ‘living’ Shakti (manifest Divinity) to balance Shiva (transcendent Divinity), the Cosmic order was thrown into disarray.

Shiva had no interest in the world, and in any event he was ‘powerless’ (Shakti = Power, Energy) without Shakti. And so the gods prayed to Shakti to reincarnate and bring Shiva back into the world, thereby restoring the cosmic balance and saving the world. Shakti agreed and thereupon took birth as Parvati, the daughter of Himavan, the Lord of the Mountains.

Of course she grew up to be a stunningly beautiful, charming and alluring woman – her ‘mission’ after all, was to lure Shiva out of his ascetic life and make him take her as his consort. And so every day, she would visit Shiva’s cave, sweep the floor, decorate it with flowers and offer him fruits and other gifts of the earth, hoping to win his Love.

Personification of Shakti

However, Shiva never even opened his eyes to notice her. So Parvati enlisted the help of Priti and Rati, the goddesses of Love and Longing. They transformed Shiva’s cave into a sensuous pleasure garden filled with fragrant flowers, exotic songbirds and buzzing honeybees. With the stage thus set,

Kama, the beautiful God of Love appeared and shot Shiva with the arrow of desire. But Shiva, unamused, simply opened his third eye and blasted

Kama with an energy beam that incinerated him on the spot. And so Love was lost to the world.“Do not despair,” Parvati told the gods when this happened. “Shiva will be my consort. And when he does, Kama will be reborn. “Whereupon Parvati disappeared into the forest, and became an ascetic herself. She performed the most rigorous self-mortifications – sitting amidst bonfires on the hottest summer days, going without clothing in the winter snow, standing motionless on one foot for interminable periods, eating next to nothing, and engaging in the most astonishingly intense sadhana. In fact, Parvati fully matched Shiva’s own asceticism, detaching herself totally from the world; completely mastering her body and mind. So perfect an ascetic was she that the other forest renunciates named her Aparna.